At the end of my SURF, we'd made quite a bit of progress. We had a working prototype which we coulddemonstrate! My mentor arranged for us to present at the Smart Grid Symposium, which was sponsored by Southern California Edison. They were interested in our work because they would like…

I've mostly finished my SURF. By this, I mean that I'm no longer being paid. The thing about research projects, I've discovered, is that they never really end. You can always do more experiments, or refine your data, or go in a new and different direction. It's one of the…

The adapters that I spent so long getting were immediately put to good use. One of my friends had just bought a copy of Rock Band 2 (marked down because of the new Beatles Rock Band), somebody else had a XBox 360 we could use, we borrowed some controllers, and…

The other day, I wanted some cables. What I needed were two 1/4" Stereo Male to RCA Female adapters, so I could hook up an X-box to the house speaker system. First, I tried several shops along Lake Avenue, but none of them knew what I was talking about. I…

While I was home, my parents and I took a trip up to visit my sister at college. She's a freshman at Carnegie Mellon and she had just finished her second week of classes. I got to see her dorm room! My parents had already seen it when she moved…

My SURF took quite a bit of work at the beginning, getting everything working. We built our whole system from scratch, so nothing actually worked until several weeks in. Now we have a working system! Currently, we only have one working client, a laptop in my SURF mentor's office. We…

When I came to Caltech, I had never surfed before. It was always something that I wanted to do one day, but the beaches in Maryland are crowded and the waves aren't very good. So, I had no experience surfing and no idea how to start. Luckily, Caltech has a…

A week ago, my friend Mike (a fellow Darb) gave me a heads up that his new band was going to have its first real gig soon. So, Tuesday night I went downtown with Max, Perrin, and Stephanie to check it out. It was at the Cat Club, which is…

So why did he come to me? I mentioned in my first post that I'm a Health Advocate (Health Ad) for Dabney House. Each of the undergraduate houses has a few Health Ads. We get 90+ hours of training in First Aid, Emergency Response, Bloodborne Pathogens, Peer Counseling, etc. and…

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Why is Dano trying to knock down Millikan library with a sledgehammer? This summer I'm working on a distributed seismic network. It will hopefully be a faster network, with thousands of nodes, which gives us the potential for early warning. Everybody knows that big important organizations like the USGS (United…

On Saturday, I went surfing! Max, Sly, Andrew, Erin, John, and I all headed down to Bolsa Chica beach in the morning (I’m told that it means “Bag Lady” in Spanish, but it’s a really nice surfing beach, especially for beginners). We assumed it would be warm, so none of…